“Yay!”
Arkay inspected the small, glowing orb that he had just created. It flickered and glistened with a warm radiance, slowly spinning around. The orb wasn’t a perfect sphere and would occasionally send out small twirls of pink energy, but Arkay was still pretty pleased with himself.
“Now to share it…”
With a smile, Arkay grabbed his communicator, which had a built-in camera. After some fussing around with the angles, Arkay took several images, deleted them then took a couple more. Once he was satisfied, he opened up one of his communication apps. A virtual keypad popped up and Arkay started typing on it.
“Hey guys, look what I made!”
Still smiling, Arkay attached the image of his small glowing orb, then hit the Send button.
“I hope someone likes it…” Arkay muttered to himself. There was a slow pause, then a little pop sound emanated from his communicator. Someone had replied to his picture.
“Looks cool!”
“Thanks!” Arkay immediately typed, before hesitating. Was it too early to reply? He wasn’t sure. But he hit send anyway, wanting to look polite.
“How do you do those little swooshy things?” a second message appeared. “They are so cool!”
Arkay grinned. He knew exactly how he made the swooshy things, the little solar flares. But was he willing to give away his secret? It wasn’t exactly a secret. In fact, Arkay had discovered it by accident, after being unable to follow a guide that did something similar.
“Well, it’s actually pretty easy!” Arkay felt like he was teasing this person a little. “It’s mostly just a bunch of whirling gas!”
“Neat!” came a reply.
Akay smiled and leaned back in his chair. But as he sat there, he noticed he wasn’t getting any more messages. Replies had completely dried up. Deciding that he needed to add some more information, Arkay typed a quick reply about how this little star was just the start. After all, he was a very low level Life Goddess, and more advanced Life Goddesses could create entire miniature universes, keep them in their pockets and just throw them at enemies to completely annihilate one.
There were two replies, but both were brief.
“Nice.”
“Cool.”
Now Arkay was feeling a little bit low. He knew his creations weren’t perfect, but they clearly seemed to rank lower than other people’s stuff. Then again, at the same time, posting the odd picture on the odd text stream was never going to get much attention. There was too much good stuff for Arkay’s little star to shine through.
“Maybe I should make it brighter…” Arkay muttered to himself. After all, his star was pretty small. More of a brown dwarf than a white dwarf. Not that it was actually brown. In fact, the star looked closer to magenta, when real stars were often yellow or orange.
That being said, Arkay didn’t want to fiddle around with the new star he had created. It was probably better off to make a new star, so he could get the ingredients to the right temperature more accurate and evenly.
However, Arkay’s concentration was quickly broken by a knock on the door.
“You busy in there, Arkay? You’ve been hiding in your room for ages.”
The voice belonged to Arkay’s roommate, Kallis. His forte was less art and more doing weights. Over the last few weeks, Kallis had started getting back into going to the gym, and was genuinely enjoying it. It showed as well, Kallis had built some muscle underneath his armour.
“Sorry, was busy working on a project.”
“Oh, what sort of project?”
Arkay got up and opened the door to his bedroom. Kallis was standing there, very sweaty and wrapped in a large towel.
“I decided to try make stars again, I haven’t done so in ages.”
“Ohh, can I see?”
“Yeah, of course.”
Kallis peered in, then grinned.
“That’s a cool-ass star.”
“Thank you!” Arkay started smiling again. “I’ve worked really hard on it. Despite having taken a break from star-making…”
“Well, it’s really good, whether you’re rusty or not!”
“I really appreciate that, thank you Kallis!”
“You’re welcome! Keep up the good work!”